Livelihood

The birth of Adivasi Mahila Mahasangh (AMM)

“I did not know anything; whether one needed to start work first and then register the sanstha, or register first and then begin the work. I was completely naïve,” Mamta reminisces about the early days. “Somehow I formed the sangathan with some other like-minded people, and without much planning or thinking, we named it Jashpur Jan Vikas Sanstha. We did not even know where the registration could be done, but we were helped by an uncle of mine. He guided us through the registration process which was done in Bilaspur in 2003. Since my uncle had quite a bit of influence, the registration was complete in just about 3 months, after we paid a sum of Rs.5,000.” The sangathan then began to work in the villages. It was first essential to understand how they would enter the villages as complete strangers and how they could possibly work with the people.

Jhiri is a village of 150 households located in Manohar Thana block, Jhalawar district in south-east Rajasthan. The majority of the people in the village and around belong to the Lodha caste (OBC) and a smaller percentage to SCs and STs. Traditionally the only means of livelihood for the people in this area has been farming, but diminishing returns from agriculture in the past few decades have led to poverty, heavy indebtedness to local moneylenders and large scale migration. Adding to the problem are superstitions and a lack of awareness about modern medicine that lead to deaths from easily curable ailments and diseases. Being a stronghold of the political right wing, the region has seen a rise in religious fanaticism that has deeply communalised the people.

Maati started as a small group of women who came together in the mid 1990s to protest against rampant alcoholism. In 1994, within one month there were two cases in which husbands in their drunkenness had burnt their wives to death, but there was a conspiracy of silence around these shocking incidents with nobody willing to speak up. Malika, Basanti and a few others got together, held meetings in several villages and mobilised women, writing post cards to people’s representatives in villages all around. 1000 women came forward for a meeting in Munsiyari where they put forth a memorandum to the SDM asking for the sale of alcohol to be stopped. This protest became a seed from which the sangathan grew into a space for women to meet, talk, express themselves, and share their joys and sorrows.